“My pony! He can’t carry all my luggage. That box must go,” said Oscar, pointing to a large carpenter’s chest, which had once belonged to his father. “If I can’t take them with me I might as well stay at home.”
“What’s in it?” asked the colonel.
“A complete set of taxidermist’s tools, artificial eyes, a lot of annealed wire of different sizes, some strong paper for making funnels, pasteboard boxes and cotton for packing away the smaller specimens, and—oh, there are lots of things in it!”
“I should think so! Are you going to put up your birds and animals as fast as you shoot them?”
“No, sir. I couldn’t do that with the limited facilities I shall have at my command. I simply want to put the skins in such shape that I can mount them when I get home. I brought the eyes with me because it is easier to insert them when the specimen is first killed than it is to put them in after the skin is brought to life again.”
“What do you mean by that? I’d like to see you restore a dead bird to life.”
“I didn’t say I could do that,” answered Oscar, with a laugh. “But I can restore the skin to life.”
“It makes no difference whether the body is in the skin or not, I suppose?”
“None whatever. I don’t care if the body was cooked and eaten a year before the skin came into my hands. You see, it isn’t necessary that we should use any extra pains in caring for the skins of animals. No matter how badly rumpled the hair may become it can be combed straight at any time. When the body has been taken out, and the bones you need are nicely cleaned, and the eyes are inserted, and the skin has been thoroughly cured with arsenic, it is rolled up and packed away until we get ready to use it.”
“I should think that if you left it for any length of time it would become as hard as a brick.”